General Policies

Be Respectful

...of others in the lab, research participants, data, and the university.

Students are expected to follow Dalhousie's Code of Student Conduct.

Everyone in the lab is expected to adhere to the Tri-Council Policy Statement on research ethics.

Please see also Roles & Expectations, Communication, and Behaviour

Never share your password

Never share your password with anyone, including others in the lab. This is critical to maintaining our ethical and legal duties to our research participants, and the university, to protect people's private information. Lab members come and go, so if you share your password someone may leave the lab but still have access to our data.

Anyone working in the lab is entitled to an account, so there should be no reason to share passwords. If someone is having an issue with their account, assign Aaron a to-do on BaseCamp to fix it.

Never share data with people outside the lab, without permission from Aaron. We do want to share our data and practices as widely as possible, but this needs to be done appropriately within ethical and legal constraints. See the Open Science page

Data Stays in the Lab

All data that we collect is protected by Canadian and Nova Scotian privacy laws. All data is collected under protocols reviewed and approved by a Research Ethics Board (REB), which specifies how we will protect the data and who can see or use it. Your use of this data is a privilege and is restricted to the terms of the REB protocols.

All data that you collect should stay in the lab. Never take any paper documents (including questionnaires, other paper data, consent forms) out of the lab. If you collect data outside the lab (e.g., an fMRI study), it should be taken to the lab as soon as possible after it is collected.

Electronic data should live only on lab computers. In general this should not be a problem, because you can access the file server remotely and securely, and you can run many analyses on Architect via a web browser or terminal. You should not download research data onto your personal computer unless you have explicit permission from Aaron. Please see Data Storage & Protection for more details.

While we believe in Open Science, and the principles of sharing data and analysis procedures with the community, this must be done within the constraints of ethical and legal guidelines. Thus you should not share data with anyone outside the lab without approval from Aaron first, and only under terms that he specifies.

Conflict of Interest

All lab personnel are bound by Dalhousie University's Conflict of Interest policy.